


Guardian Angel - Wake Me Up

by BleakCinema



Series: Guardian Angel [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Hoosier Daddy, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-07 18:30:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7725157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleakCinema/pseuds/BleakCinema
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes have had the floor yanked out from under them more times than they'd like to recall, but they can't fall forever.  </p><p>Part Three of Guardian Angel-verse.  Stories of how the lost children of the new Overwatch find their footing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. When It's All Over

He watched in the wing mirror as the graceful, glass-bedazzled spires of Numbani shrunk behind the convoy.  The sun of the early day glinted like fire off of the sweeping windows and carefully wrought metal of seemingly delicate architecture.  He watched idly as long as he could until the dust from their heavy vehicles covered it in a fever-haze that even the sun couldn’t burn through.  Soon behind them there was only the cloud and the horizon.  Just vaguely out of the corner of the mirror, he could make out the side of their hulking payload transport.

 

The windows of their late-generation humvee were popped in deference to the burgeoning heat of another scorching African day, the five soldiers inside all leaning away from the direct sun.  One or two hid their eyes under the lips of their helmets.  The two men in front wore sunglasses to protect themselves from the glare coming in the windscreen.  The man riding shotgun was a stocky African man, second generation American by way of Nigeria, and he had one combat boot up on the dash.  His eyes were hidden behind a pair of wraparounds and he was bobbing his head along with the music.

 

The soldiers in the back were bickering lightly over a cat-slim, wide-eyed Omega girl from the city last night and which one was going to come back for her after the operation.

 

The driver sat more or less silent behind the wheel (theirs the lead vehicle in the convoy), idly checking the GPS at intervals to make sure they were still on track.  He looked back once more to try and catch sight of the City of Harmony, eyes drifting to the mirror behind his heavy aviators.  He tried to ignore the raspy sound of music roaring out of the dash where someone’s player had been plugged in for the long trek across the savannah, only half hearing a punky shriek followed by lyrics vaguely referencing old presidential scandals against a thumping beat.  He tried not to be too annoyed.  At least Santi hadn’t insisted on _Synaesthesia Auditiva_ again, it was good, but it did weird things to his head.

 

He let himself drift, eyes half lidded behind his shades while his mind tried to parse memory from the now.  It had been so long since he’d seen Numbani and things had been so different then...

 

He snapped out of it when a meaty slap landed roughly across the back of his head, knocking his helmet askew until it tipped almost into his eyes.

 

The driver scrabbled to get his vision back, snapping at his navigator, “ _Mierda!_ Bada, what the fuck?”

 

“Will you relax Whitebread? You’re making me nervous.  Why you look so tense anyway? This is a babysitting job,” the beefy Alpha in the passenger’s seat grinned, flashing pearly teeth against his dark skin.

 

His rich accent didn’t make him any less damn annoying.

 

“When you gonna stop calling me Whitebread, Bada? I’m half Latino,” Ira deadpanned, running a hand over the MP flash on his left bicep.

 

Another wolfish flash of those chompers, “When you stop being whiter than me.”

 

“Fucker,” the driver rolled his eyes behind his aviators.

 

“Could be worse.  Could call you ‘Zero’ like Kelley and the others.”

 

Ira’s lip curled at the nickname.  

 

It had started up in Basic when Kelley (an extremely forward Beta from Brooklyn) had tried to scent him.  Kelley had been pushy as hell when he first enlisted, a Beta with the insufferable swagger of an unchecked Alpha and a lot of the same unwelcome habits.  He’d taken early to trying to establish some sort of dominance over the others by scenting their designation and pushing to see who pushed back.  A fellow MP, he’d tried that shit on Ira when they were sparring one day, shoving his face into the other man’s neck while attempting a pin.  He’d been so shocked not to find any sort of designation marker that he’d busted up laughing right there, mockingly dubbing him Zero.  Ira had kicked his ass so hard in retribution he’d had to be hauled off by their trainer, but the name had stuck.

 

Bada laughed so hard his driver thought he was going to be sick.

 

“Can we at least change the music?” Ira asked in a tone so cold it could have frozen Siberia.

 

“We’re not fucking listening to Kansas again,” came a voice from the back seat.

 

Ira’s navigator (and current CO) nodding smugly, “Seconded.  Also, I’m pulling rank on the radio.”

 

“...You’re pulling rank over the road tunes.”

 

“Sorry, Whitebread, but them’s the breaks,” Bada winked, voice dark and smooth, “Seriously though, we’re outside _Numbani_.  Nothing is going to happen.  Even Santi is chill.”

 

Ira’s eyes flicked to the back seat where the one Omega sat flanked by the other Alpha and the single Beta in their vehicle.  All three had moved on from the girl in the city to squabbling over a card game from last week in the Mess.  Santi was more along the lines of what Omegas had been stereotyped as in bygone days.  He was as good a soldier as any, but he was prone to paranoia and his startle reflex was intense.  It was part of the reason he’d ended up as an Army Mechanic.  He’d originally applied for a rifleman’s job, but the startle reflex had given him a trigger finger too itchy for even the military.  For the moment, however, he seemed relatively unwound, bantering openly with the Alpha on his right, a Washington native with the surname of Cox.  

 

Kelley just flashed a smarmy raised eyebrow at Ira from where he sat on the other side in the back.

 

They were assholes, all of them.  

 

Still, they were the kind of assholes Ira could deal with.  Even as far back as Basic, they’d never brought up the matter of his parentage.  They never mooned over the fact that his father had been Strike Commander Morrison, never asked awkward questions or whispered when they thought he couldn’t hear.  They never mocked him for his mother, never used it as a basis for his character or a barometer for his future.  Sure, they still made fun of him, but it was based entirely on his own faults and foibles.  Bada harassed him for being too uptight and tried endlessly to get under his skin.  Kelley insulted him for his failure to present (but that didn’t get to him anymore now that he knew he could wipe the floor with the mouthy shit).  Santi and Cox jumped in on it from time to time, but as with the other two it was always based on his own merit.  

 

They were assholes, yeah, but Ira noted with grudging pleasure that they were his assholes.

 

He reached up to adjust his olive-coloured, checked neck scarf, the sort used to keep out grit and sand on desert ops, “They even tell you what we’re hauling, Bada?”

 

The big Alpha rolled one shoulder, running a thumb over the lip of his helmet and tapping his foot idly, “We got reports of Talon activity at the Overwatch exhibition during the Unity Day festivities here in Numbani.  Got two kids swearing there was actual damn Overwatch activity too.  Got the top brass nervous, so they wanted a military escort to get it back to the Vaults.  We’ve got this leg, then the Brits pick it up at the port.  Mossad meets it on the other side and the Germans escort it the rest of the way.  We’re hauling some of the more...volatile artifacts.”

 

Ira’s blue eyes widened sharply behind the lenses of his sunglasses at the mention of Overwatch.

 

Cox snorted from the back seat, “Overwatch activity?”

 

“Kids accurately described interference from two operatives matching descriptions of former agents.  Call signs Tracer and Winston,” Bada affirmed.

 

Ira tried to suppress a wince when he felt curious eyes on the back of his helmet.  Sure, none of them judged him on his heritage, but it was hard to entirely forget where he’d come from.  Morrison-Reyes was still stitched into the breast of his uniforms after all.  They were looking to him for confirmation.  He was just trying not to be sick.  He tried not to remember long days spent in the safer parts of Winston’s lab as a child, racing around those gentle, oversized feet.  Ice went down his spine, but he kept his face impassive behind his glasses, half hidden by the shade from his helmet.

 

“They accurately described two former operatives while in the middle of an Overwatch exhibit with footage of all the former Overwatch operatives.  Children are easily influenced, especially by media representations.  I’d take it with a grain of salt,” Ira’s voice was a forced sort of unimpressed.

 

“Right.  A figment of some kids’ imaginations stopped a Talon raid.  Nice theory, Zero,” Kelley kicked fitfully at the back of Ira’s seat, causing the blue-eyed man to growl back at him.

 

“I didn’t say the witnesses made it all up.  I’m just saying that the likelihood of former operatives breaking the Petras Act and violating a direct UN sanction is fucking unlikely.”

 

He white-knuckled on the wheel.  He’d know if Overwatch was back.  Miss Angie would have told him.  Someone would have told him.  

 

His stomach dipped.

 

Cox leaned forward between the seats, “Whatever, Spock.”

 

Kelley kicked the back of Ira’s seat again, listening to the heated leather creak, “The weird alien from that friggin’ ancient TV show? What does he have to do with the price of tea in China?”

 

There was a soft smack from the back seat as Cox cuffed Kelley in the side of the head, “Benjamin Spock was a child behavioural specialist in the 1940s.”

 

“Debunked,” Bada piped up from his place in shotgun, swiveling his head back slightly.

 

“Oh my God,” Ira hissed and hunched forward over the wheel, trying to tune out the rest of their absurd conversation while simultaneously glad they’d been distracted.

 

His squad could not only argue with a fencepost, they would argue around it and about it while they were at it.  Ira let their banter turn into a low drone like cicadas in the summer grain, turning his eyes to the stretch of savannah around them.  He studied the dry earth stretching away from the humvee and tried to remind himself that he only _felt_ like he was sinking, that the weight on his chest was only in his mind.  He’d gotten good at convincing himself in his downswings between happy moments, in the times when all he could feel was like he’d been sliding slowly downwards ever since Angela had showed up on his aunt’s doorstep years ago.  She’d taken the floor out from under him with a slump in her shoulders and words like ‘explosion’ and ‘Zurich’ on her lips.  Winston and Tracer.

 

His fingers tightened a bit more on the wheel, his bones creaking with the strain.

 

“Zero.”

 

Ira startled out of his ruminations when he realized Santi had leaned all the way forward, leaving the Beta and Alpha in the back seat arguing over the top of him.  Bada had turned to engage with them and Santi’s big black eyes were trained on the windshield.  The Omega’s body had gone very still, staring straight ahead like a well-bred hound.

 

“...What is it?” He asked, knowing better than to mistrust Santi.

 

He might have lacked the trigger discipline to be a rifleman, but his heightened paranoiac impulses made him like a canary in a mineshaft.  Though he was only designated as their acting mechanic, the crew had long ago realized the Omega was valuable for other reasons and they took care to pay attention.  

 

He lifted a hand to point, “Black sand.”

 

Blue eyes hidden by those dark aviators whipped back to the terrain, scanning the horizon.  By now, the rest of the truck had started to pay attention, attuned to Santi’s body language.  Bada had gone on high alert, turning to face forward with a finger hovering over his comm unit, the frequency already set for intra-convoy messaging.  He was waiting tensely, all joking gone, ready to take control of the unit at the drop of the proverbial hat.  His mouth had gone terribly thin and bloodless.  In the back, Cox seemed to be holding her breath.

 

Ira only spotted the tell-tale wisp of darkness drifting against the mid-morning sunshine in the heartbeat  before a percussive shotgun blast shattered their windshield in the middle.

 

The world slowed down and flashed forward in one paradoxical moment.  Ira felt his heart speeding agonizingly in his ears, forcing his pulse so fast through his veins that it ached under his skin.  He felt every muscle in his arms strain as he jerked the wheel to the side, metal squealing when the hulking vehicle tried to obey.  Sand sprayed up around them in a gritty, burning wave, the humvee tipping perilously.  It all seemed so slow compared to the roaring in his ears.  Even the imploding glass from the destroyed windshield seemed to drift on air currents, like he could sweep them out of the way with ease if only he could pry his hands up off the wheel.  They tore into his cheeks at a snail’s pace, making him experience every agonizing moment through the veil of adrenaline.  The pieces pinging off his glasses and helmet sounded like thunder.

 

Tipping dizzily on one side, Ira wondered with a rising edge of hysteria how they’d ever evade the threat in time when they could only crawl along.

 

Another deafening boom tore through the air, slamming into the side of the overbalanced truck and pushing the perilous center of gravity too far.  The whole thing went catty-wampus, rolling up and over onto its side.  It went over all at once, Ira’s side slamming into the ground hard enough that his head cracked against the glass of his window.  Everything grayed out around him.  Down through the muddle of his head injury, he heard someone shouting.  

 

Santi.  

 

The initial blast should have ripped into him first.  Bless the Omega startle reflex.  

 

The little Chilean was fighting to get past the seats, scrabbling at his side-arm to pull it loose while shoving at the humvee’s door with one booted foot.  He was clearly shouting viciously, but his voice faded in and out with the ringing in Ira’s head.  Behind him, he felt a kick at his seat.  Kelley.  A bit of something wet dripped into the young soldier’s eyes and he suddenly didn’t have the presence of mind to wonder why Bada was being so quiet.  Ira blinked and pawed at his face, trying to get the liquid from stinging at his eyes, trying to figure out why his side burned.  Where had his helmet gone?

 

There was a bang as Santi got the door open.  

 

“Zero!”

 

Kelley was shouting in Ira’s face and suddenly there were strong hands wrapped in the front of his uniform, dragging him up towards the open door Santi had already shimmed out of.  A sharp slap brought things back in focus and he was aware of gunshots.  He was aware of the powerful stink of ozone.  Ira could hear shouting.  The convoy was under attack.  The whole world snapped forward, syncing with the rapid-fire pace of his heart, focusing down.  Ira’s head jerked towards the passenger’s seat and Kelley grabbed his chin, looking grim.

 

He shook his head, shouting over the din, “Don’t look, Zero.  Come on, we’ve got to get the fuck out of here.  Someone’s going after the payload!”

 

It was enough to galvanize them.

 

Both soldiers were clawing their way out of the sand choked metal tomb, up through the half kicked-off door, and quickly dropped down on the leeward side to put a solid barrier between themselves and the shooting.  Santi was already crouched there and he went pale when he looked at Ira.  A rapid head-shake from Kelley and he was quiet.  Cox didn’t follow.  Neither did Bada.

 

The entire convoy had come to a halt when the lead vehicle, theirs, had been assaulted.  The other personnel looked dazed, standing warily next to their vehicles with their weapons at the ready.  No other humvee was damaged...not so much as scratched.  It was only the demolition of their vehicle that had halted the convoy.  Aside from the first startled spates of gunfire, the savannah around them had gone eerily silent.  Santi’s eyes narrowed as he crouched a little lower against the underside of the flipped humvee’s chassis, Kelley next to him with his hands wrapped around his weapon.  The three soldiers radiated tension.

 

Kelley hissed through his teeth, “This is a trap.”

 

Ira didn’t question.  Kelley was a prick, not an idiot.

 

The two military policemen drew in on either side of the Omega with them, even if Ira fumbled due to blood loss and what had definitely been a concussion.  His side still burned and his leg felt a bit wet, but the adrenaline dumping on a loop into his bloodstream kept him from feeling the scope of his damage.  There was scraping down the back of Santi’s neck from where he’d ducked under the blast before it could kill him and Kelley’s right cheek  had a flash of white every time he turned his head.  His cheekbone.  The savannah around them was too quiet, like a sprawling monster waiting to exhale.

 

They were stranded.  Far enough out from Numbani that by the time help arrived from the city proper it would be too late.  On the other end, they were nowhere near the coast, at least not near enough for the Brits to provide expedient aid.

 

They were fucked.

 

“Santi…” Ira murmured low, keeping his eyes trained forward, “Can you get back to the radio in the hummer? We need to make contact.”

 

The Omega nodded and turned back to try and climb up their gutted vehicle at least far enough to access the cab.  

 

The calm before the storm shattered with another deafening roar from the shotgun that had ripped through their windshield and their friends.  For the second time that day, Ira found himself praising the startle reflex as Santi dropped down hard on his ass with wide-eyed terror, but blessedly whole.  He was trembling all over as the sound echoed, looking like he’d seen a ghost.

 

“Reaper.”

 

Ira and Kelley locked eyes before the other MP tapped his short-range comm unit hissing into it, “We have sighted Reaper.  I repeat, we have a confirmed visual of Talon agent, Reaper.”

 

Across from them, a soldier jerked off his feet like her strings had been yanked by a sick puppeteer.  Her head went first as if propelled, her shoulders twitched after her, and her whole body listed to the side.  It looked like she had been shoved by invisible hands.  Invisible hands definitely didn’t make the divot in the sand at her feet, though.  They didn’t spread a fine red mist in the air.  A loud crack filled the air a few seconds after the soldier began to fall, leaving no room for doubt.

 

They had a sniper.

 

Another soldier went down with a snap and Ira growled, “Kelley, we’re going to make a run for the payload.  Santi, keep with us.  Stay safe.  Keep your head down.”

 

Ira did something he remembered his mother doing in times of strain.  

 

He closed his eyes.  He breathed in, then out.

 

Then he was running.

 

He narrowed himself down to pure sensation and instinct.  He could hear Kelley pounding at his heels, but let all the other sounds fade into a background din.  He felt his muscles contract and release under the skin as he ran, letting that feeling rise above the spasms of pain that tried to wrack him.  He was vaguely aware of a trickle of sweat between his shoulderblades.  His glasses long gone in the crash, he zeroed in with almost perfect clarity on the hulking vehicle at the heart of their convoy, the payload.  He ran in a disorienting serpentine motion, ducking and weaving, spitting curses whenever a bullet licked too close to his heel.  

 

Breathe in, breathe out.

 

They tore past the humvee nearest to the payload and there was a click.

 

There was a proximity klaxon.

 

A loud bang issued from underneath the vehicle and a noxious gas surged out in a violently coloured cloud.  Ira had enough time to realize they’d been herded directly into a trap before the haze was on him.  He scrambled for his gas mask, unsnapping the respirator and dragging it over his face.  He could feel the straps yanking at his short hair,  the air in his mask smelling stale, but at least not actively killing him like the poison outside of it.  His skin itched violently, rashing over he was sure, but at least this wouldn’t be the thing to end him.  Not right now.  Not today.

 

Breathe in, breathe out.

 

__________

 

There was a ridge just to the side of the ambush, covered in scrub.  It rose opposite a stand of acacia trees, hemming in the convoy on either side.  It was a natural bottleneck that nobody had anticipated until it was too late.  On the ridge situated across from the small acacia line, a lone motorcycle rolled up, two riders  astride its gleaming metal carapace.  The growling engine switched off as it cruised to a stop, the driver hopping off on long legs, spurs jingling as he made contact with terra firma.  His passenger slipped off the opposite side much more quietly, only the barest puff of dust rising when his toes made contact.

 

Jesse McCree tapped at his ear, opening up a channel, “Turns out they had more balls than we were hopin’.  They damn well routed us.  It’s a massacre down there.”

 

After the daring attempted daylight heist during Numbani’s annual Unity Day, Winston had harbored an unpleasant suspicion that Talon would try again.  He knew very well that he and Tracer were all ready all over the gossip rags and tabloids, so they couldn’t be visible at all for awhile.  In deference to that fact, he’d stalked the military comm channels like a man possessed until he’d pinned down the transport date and route.  If he could do it, he reasoned, then so could Talon.  He’d arranged a small, covert escort mission to shadow the convoy, sending along McCree and Hanzo astride a modified bike capable of making good time over the Numbani terrain without drawing attention.  As an extra safety measure, a small cloaked transport would be following them up with Tracer piloting and Angela along for insurance.

 

They’d hoped Talon might not be so brazen, but it seemed like nefarious sleeper organizations never took a day off.

 

Winston’s voice rumbled from the other end, “Give me a sit-rep, McCree.”

 

“Wishin’ I could, big guy.  This was a full blown ambush.  They musta been lyin’ in wait for ages.  We already missed most of the action,” Jesse drawled, reaching to unholster Peacekeeper.

 

There was an annoyed tongue-click behind him before there was a small, dark shadow at his shoulder and a deep, dulcet voice in his ear, “Winston.  Signs of heavy damage matching Reaper’s dual shotgun technique mixed with clear evidence of a sniper.  Surviving escorts are wearing gas masks.  Indicative of a venom mine.”

 

Jesse turned to wink at none other than the older Shimada brother, giving him a slow grin, “What he said.”

 

Hanzo took his hand off of his comm unit and glared hard enough that it seemed like he wanted to strip the cowboy’s flesh from his bones.  Too bad for him Jesse had been trained  by the meanest Omega to ever walk the Earth.  Even Hanzo’s fiercest side-eye was a spring breeze compared to a full Reyes stare-down.

 

“You are an idiot.”

 

“You’re not the first to say so, darlin,” Jesse purred before giving Winston his attention again, “They don’t have the payload yet, but s’only a matter of time.  We’ve got a _lotta_ dead soldiers down there.”

 

“Well, ensure there aren’t more.  We need to rescue those units and make sure Talon doesn’t get what it wants,” Winston’s voice, even far away, was full of the conviction that had gotten their fledgeling group this far from the ashes.

 

McCree nodded and switched off the comm before looking to Hanzo, “You ready for a little counter-sniper work, darlin?”

 

The assassin was already breezing past him, chilly and aloof as ever, “Are you ready for some _actual_ work, cowboy?”

 

Grinning feral, Jesse snagged the smaller archer around the waist before he could get to far, reeling him in close and murmuring low, “Tell you what, you get that cold-blooded bitch and I’ll bring ya back ol’ Owl-Face’s head on a stick.”

 

“Arrogant,” the other Alpha snarled up at him before leaning in to hiss in his ear, “Do not die.  Now go.”

 

The elder Shimada slid from the Cowboy’s arms like water and slipped away, already knocking an arrow to his bow.  His tawny form disappeared behind a rock outcropping on the ridge, finding cover while he readied a sonic arrow.  There would not be enough skill in the world to hide Widowmaker from the eldest Shimada dragon once he had the scent.  Jesse tipped his hat up with one thumb, giving a low whistle as he appreciated the final sight of a gold sash following behind its owner like a radiant tail.  He cocked Peacekeeper and turned to descend into the chaos.

 

“Meaner’n a damn snake…”

 

He gave a jaunty two-fingered salute to the cloaked transport he knew lingered somewhere in the sky with a few vital members of the crew.  Time to dispense some justice.

 

__________

 

It had all gone to hell so fast.  

 

Ira was fighting every instinct to gasp through his mask, knowing that it wouldn’t help.  He’d suffocate himself it he tried to force air too fast through the respirator.  His skin burned and he only had one eye to see through from all the blood, but at least he was still upright.  He was gripping his pistol in both hands, holding it down between his knees in a resting Weaver stance with his back up against one of the convoy’s humvees that had survived the initial blitz.  He knew that Kelley and Santi were pinned down behind another.  There were only two shooters from what they could tell, but they were helpless for all that.  If one of them tried to move solo, the sniper wasted no time trying to put them in the dirt.  If more than one attempted a rush, then the roar of a shotgun was there to scoot them back into hiding.

 

It was a game now.  

 

They were outclassed and outgunned no matter how many of them there were.  It was a waiting game to see who would get impatient first and Ira had an idea they were the losers no matter what.  Either they lost their cool and did something stupid, leaving them wide open for the raiders, or they sat like rabbits in their burrows and they were picked off when their assailants got bored.  Ira Morrison-Reyes drew an angry, helpless breath in through his nose, clutching his gun and glaring at the world through the dirty viewer of his respirator.  He strained his ear for Santi and Kelley.

 

Instead, he heard heavy footfalls across the scrubland.  Every muscle in his body locked tight.  He felt a line of cold sweat slip down under his uniform collar, his own breath huffing against the respirator.  The footsteps were coming up the line of trucks, ambling towards the payload with all the time in the world.  As far as any of the remaining soldiers were concerned, the gunman did.  Fucker was even humming.  It sounded like some perverse rendition of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, slow and menacing and utterly unconcerned.

 

Ira traced every footfall, taking a deep breath when it stopped what sounded like two trucks down.  He heard laughter.

 

Then a bang.

 

Like fish in a barrel.  That’s all they were now.  

 

The footsteps started again and Ira felt panic squeeze icy around his heart.  The next vehicle up the line was the one Santi and Kelley were hidden behind.  He heard Santi make a sharp noise when he realized it too even while Kelley tried to shush him too late.  Every footstep was a death knell for his squad mates.  Time did that funny thing again where it paused even while continuing to march on, almost as if his brain was trying desperately to slam on the brakes of reality.  The future split in half.  He could sit here like a rabbit in the warren and keep himself safe just a few desperate seconds longer...or he could lose his cool and do something truly stupid.

 

The footsteps stopped.  He heard Kelley snarl protectively.

 

Truly stupid it was then.

 

Ira threw himself out from behind the truck and didn’t even bother to aim his pistol.  If he stopped for even a second the sniper would have him dead to rights.  If he was going to do something crazy, then it was going to have to be so brazenly lunatic in scope that neither of them would have time to see it coming.  His boots dug into scrubby grass and sand as he charged headlong at the gunman, bracing himself for impact.  As he reached the massive man, he slammed into him like a berserker, bear-hugging and using all of his momentum to throw the fucker off his feet if he could.

 

“Santi! Kelley! Go, go, go, go!” Ira shouted over the gunman’s outraged grunt.

 

The two stared at him in shock before making a break for it, Kelley shoving Santi into motion.  He didn’t know how far they would make it or if they’d even survive, but it was worth it for the blind chance that they _might_.  

 

You didn’t hit the jackpot if you didn’t gamble a little, right?

 

The world moved into real-time again as his cannonball run left him with nowhere to go but the ground, the Talon agent underneath him.  He felt an exhilarating thrill for the barest moment as he tried to bring his pistol to bear, hoping for a lucky shot before the shooter could get his bearings again.

 

This gamble was nothing but snake-eyes all the way.

 

A heavy shotgun whipped up and cracked across his brow bone, leaving him howling in anger and pain.  It threw him like a ragdoll onto his back, the blow exacerbating his pre-existing concussion and leaving him nauseous and dizzy.  He groaned and tried to sit up, tried to get back into a fighting stance.  Ira was running almost entirely on instinct since his higher thought processes were out to lunch.  He knew if he stopped moving, just as before, he was a dead man.  His enemy was faster, though, stronger and more ruthless.  He shoved the young soldier back down into the dirt with one of those fiendishly heavy boots, holding him there and pressing on his collarbone until it creaked.

 

“Nice to see some of you kids still have some balls,” the Talon agent snarled down at him, his voice blurred and cracked from whatever modulator was in his mask.

 

Ira tried to get a good look at him through his blood and his concussion.  Bastard was built like a brick shithouse from what he could see under ammo belts and a heavy coat.  The outfit underneath almost looked like a uniform, but he couldn’t linger too long on it.  How could he with that mask staring down at him like death itself? It shifted in his mind’s eye until he wasn’t sure if he was looking at a cow’s skull or an owl’s countenance, perhaps some horrific combination of both.  He panicked, trying to bring his gun up only for it to be knocked violently out of his hand.

 

A shotgun barrel pressed against his temple, “Spunk.  I can respect that.”

 

He’d come out of his mother fighting and by God, he would go out of the world fighting.  Ira reached up to scrabble at the boot on his chest, coughing and trying to force it off.

 

“Kid, you’re held together by a thread as it is.  Trust me, this is as close to mercy as you’re ever gonna see,” the shooter, Reaper, mocked.

 

The cold muzzle of the gun pressed harder against his temple and Ira thrashed, managing to budge the foot just a little.  At least it was something.

 

From behind them, there was a low shriek suddenly.  It tore through the air like a wounded bird’s cry, unsettling the moment.  The sound of rustling foliage followed it, and then a thump as something from the acacia grove hit the ground.  The cavalry had arrived without either of them knowing it, the keen eye of a merciless archer turning the odds back to something somewhat favorable.  Reaper cursed, his head turned only long enough to realize his sniper was down.  When he turned back to the pinned soldier under his boot, the air gone heavy with the force of his anger.  He’d toyed with his prey and the lost time had cost him.

 

He cocked his weapon with one taloned glove and glared down at the snot-nosed upstart when he caught sight of something beneath the sole of his shoe.  A name badge.  He shifted his toe to the side.  The kid was as good as dead, but damn if he hadn’t showed a bit of moxie.  It was annoying, yes, and Reaper would enjoy painting his skull halfway across this thrice-damned ‘promised land’, but there was power in a name.  Shoot him now and he was just taking a life.  Take the nuisance’s name and he was taking his identity with him.  It would more than make up for the rain of shit that was surely heading his way.  Shifting his foot all the way to the side, he took it all in.

 

Morrison-Reyes.

 

Reaper ended up reading the faded, stitched name at least three times before it sunk in.  Whatever was left of a heart in his chest thundered and then stopped.  One name, two words, and 10 years worth of ruined memories that left him frozen.  It couldn’t be.  No, no, no, not all the way out here in the middle of a war zone of his own creation.  No, Ira was safe and sound on a farm in the middle of nowhere with Jack’s boring sister in a boring town where he would live a boring, safe life.  

 

Something desperate welled in his breast and he threw one of his shotguns away, leaving a hand free to tear at the respirator mask hiding the kid’s face.  His fingers trembled a bit at the blood he saw spattered up the interior.  Reaper wrestled with the straps until the thing was loose enough to be torn away completely, thrown off to the side as garbage.  The mercenary’s whole body froze at what was underneath...dusky horchata toned skin dusted with freckles from too long in the sun, that damned button nose that came from absolutely nowhere, and those sculpted cheekbones he remembered from a white boy with no rhythm a thousand forevers ago.  The hair was shorter, cropped right up against his head in a high-and-tight, but he’d know that colour anywhere, played with the curls often enough when he could find the time.  

 

It was the blue that paralyzed him.

 

Only one of those eyes was open, the other swollen and covered in blood.  The one that _could_ open though...it burned as blue as a cloudless sky on a sunny day.

 

The whisper that escaped the modulator was strangled with emotion, “ _Mijo…_ ”

 

A wide shot winged Reaper in the shoulder with a resounding crack, knocking him back as an all too familiar voice drawled, “That’s far enough, partner.  Now then, I promised a very pretty Alpha your head on a stick.  Y’all wanna make this easy on me?”

 

Jesse fucking McCree.

 

Reaper growled, dropped into a low crouch as Jesse ambled up, sex and attitude and smoke.  He was fighting with his Omega instincts to lunge at the Alpha standing so near to his wounded child.  But Reaper had never been a slave to his animal urges, so he forced his troublesome instincts into the back of his brain where they belonged.  He buried them neatly down with the guilty voice reminding him that he’d been the one to wound his child in the first place.  He would take the time to contend with all of it later.

 

His mind raced.  One look at Ira was enough to tell the kid wasn’t going to make it if he was left on the ground and Reaper knew for a fact that taking him back to any of the nearby Talon safehouses wasn’t going to cut it.  Even if he DID manage to scrounge up adequate medical assistance, only execution or experimentation awaited his son.  He could disappear right now with the boy, but the price of saving his life in that case (if it could even be done) was too damn high.

 

On the other hand, McCree (the ornery little cuss) was standing right there, clearly with back-up not too far off.  Not generally a team player by nature, Reaper took an educated, split-second guess that he’d gone running back to Overwatch on the heels of Winston’s adrenaline fueled ‘recall’.  Overwatch meant healers who wouldn’t immediately incarcerate a good, wounded American soldier once they’d dragged his life back from the brink, no matter what he came back as.  It was time for a gamble of his own.

 

Gathering energy for a short teleport, the mercenary leered from behind his mask, letting the expression carry in the tilt of his head, “Take it my sniper is down?”

 

“Like the itsy-bitsy spider,” Jesse smarmed, probably thinking himself very clever as he sighted Reaper down the barrel of that antiquated gun.

 

Had McCree somehow gotten more tacky?

 

“A trade then,” swallowing every mothering instinct left in him, the Omega pushed the soldier with his boot in an apparent show of cruelty, “You have a choice, cowboy.  You can take precious time trying to kill me right now, or you can use that time to save this one.  I promise you don’t have enough time for both.  He doesn’t have that much left.”

 

He used his boot to tilt his son just so, his name patch visible, upping the ante.  The idiot gunslinger was a lot more loyal than he wanted to think he was and unless the last 10 years had hardened him beyond repair, he’d take the bait.  Honestly, Reaper was lucky it was McCree he was bluffing with.  The cowboy had always had a soft core, something not even Blackwatch had beaten out of him.  It was part of the reason he’d up and left before everything had a chance to implode, the light in him too tenacious to be snuffed out.  Now, watching the scruffy man’s eyes go big, he sincerely hoped that light was still burning.

 

“Y’all get away from him,” all teasing was gone from McCree’s voice, leaving it flat and truly threatening.

 

All aces so far, but he had to be sure, “Do we have a deal? I walk and you get to play Save the Citizen.”

 

Jesse raised a hand slowly to his comm, the other still holding the Peacekeeper trained on Reaper.  He activated the unit without any of his usual flare or flamboyance.

 

“Reaper managed to slip us.  It’s a mess down here, but we’ve got a live one.  Won’t be for long, though.  We need Angela down here _yesterday_.”

 

Blessed, sainted Angela Ziegler.  Angela who knew his son like the back of her hand.  Reaper could have fucking broken out in all the gospels to know she was nearby at the 11th hour.

 

The gunslinger looked sharply back to Reaper, “Now then, partner, what’s to keep me from just holdin’ ya right there until the rest of my crew swings ‘round? Seems to me I’ve got a bullet with your name on it and the advantage.”

 

Grimly satisfied that Ira at least had a fighting chance now, Reaper let some of his ironclad control slip.  He held back a growl as his constant state of degeneration broke down his cells, releasing a cloud of ink into the air and destabilizing him enough to attempt a full shadow step to neutral ground.  Shocked, Jesse tried to get off a shot, but it was too late, the bullet tearing through nothing to disappear with a dry puff in a distant patch of soil..

 

Reaper hoped the modulator in his mask concealed even one tenth of the ruefulness in his tone, “Death couldn’t hold me, _nino_.  What makes you think you could?”

 

A wraith once more, he slipped away, suppressing every screaming instinct to go back to his child.  Angela was on her way and, if he was a very lucky boy indeed, he’d manage to scavenge something out of the payload before the rest of the merry band of misfits showed up.  After all, Talon would want an explanation if he came back empty-handed...an explanation he didn’t have outside of a highly questionable song and dance to the tune of ‘surprise! I almost killed my son then bargained with Overwatch’.  He had a feeling they wouldn’t be impressed.

 

While Reaper more or less served his own interests, he knew better than to fuck with an organization that could make women like Widowmaker.  Gabriel Reyes had become death, but he’d lived an ugly enough life to know that there were _always_ worse things.

 

The remains of Gabriel Reyes slithered away to raid what he could from the payload and collect Widowmaker before the time he’d stolen for himself ran out.

 

__________

 

Bewildered in the wake of Reaper’s retreat, Jesse holstered Peacekeeper and sat down hard next to Ira on the hard-packed dirt to wait.  The whole day had taken a turn for the surreal, nothing quite lining up anymore.  He scanned the abandoned military vehicles and the bodies lying motionless in the dirt.  Jesse McCree had seen a hundred battlefields in his life, many of them nastier than this, but this one was spinning him out something fierce.  Little things about it pinged off his sun-toughened brain until all he was left with was the impression of ‘just ain’t right’.

 

He pawed a cigar out of the nook he kept for them, lighting up and staring down at the soldier next to him.  He was grateful to note the kid was still breathing, but it was a near thing.  Little guy had shot up like a damn weed.  The gunslinger tried to reconcile the small face that had grinned so big at him from under the brim of a borrowed hat with this mangled young man laid low on the ground.  He’d never been super close with the kid, not like Angela and Winston had back in the day, but it was still enough of an association to put his stomach in knots.

 

Reaching out with one knuckle, he nudged Ira, “Hey kiddo, y’all stay with me now.  Got help on the way.”

 

One blue eye slitted open at him and McCree grimaced.  There was no way this kid wasn’t Morrison’s spawn with peepers like that.  For a minute, Ira just stared up at him as best he could manage.

 

He rasped out “...’Cree?”

 

“Easy, partner.  You sound like a bad stretch of road on a hot day.  S’alright though,” he harkened back to their very first conversation in the Zurich Med Bay about 16 years back, “The good doc’s gonna fix you right up.”

 

The blue eye blinked shut just as the transport de-cloaked overhead and Jesse really hoped life wasn’t gonna make a liar out of him again.

 

__________

 

_Author’s Notes_

 

 

  * __You are all so bad for me.  All of you.__


  * _Well, I’m not done writing the past, but after a hell of a lot of suggestions and encouragement, I decided to start writing the future.  This will be a multi-part series  Not terribly long, but we’ve seen what happens when I try to write ‘short’._


  * _This story occurs a few weeks after the museum short (which does occur during Unity Day in Numbani).  For the sake of this story, that event takes place many months after Recall.  Ira would have had to not only take his ASVAB and enlist, but also get through 10 weeks of basic training (more for combat units)._


  * _Hanzo and McCree are both Alphas.  Yes, you will be seeing more of them._


  * _The song playing in the Hummer at the beginning is absolutely “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys._


  * _Yes, Ira listens to Kansas.  Three guesses which parent he got that from._


  * _For the minor characters: Bada is American of Nigerian descent and an Alpha, Cox is a female Alpha from Washington state, Santi is an Omega of Chilean descent, and Kelley is a Beta from Jersey.  Those are all surnames._


  * _For the purposes of this story, only Angela is aware of Reaper’s identity._


  * _Both story and chapter title are from Avicii’s “Wake Me Up”._
  * _Guys, I really hope to release the next installment soon, but Dragon*Con is coming up and I have SO MANY costumes to finish.  I will do my best for you guys but...so many costumes._


  * _As always, whether you drop kudos or not, whether you comment or not, it makes me happy just to know you’re reading.  You OverNerds rock my world._



 

 


	2. Wiser and Older

Guardian Angel

Far From Home - Chapter Two

 

It really stood to reason that death was going to be as much of a shitshow as his life.

 

Wasn’t the old cliche that your life flashed before your eyes when you bought the farm? In some pain-drenched, feverish corner of his mind, Ira remembered that he’d always assumed it would be like a movie.  He assumed it would be one smooth reel of everything you’d ever done; every fuck up, every hope, every brief stitch of happiness you’d managed to eke out.  That was the way it was in the movies.  In the movies, the hero always had time for one last poignant quip before somehow managing to die gracefully while the flashbacks rolled for a weeping audience.  None of them ever showed the guy scrabbling in the dirt like a cornered possum, a snarling animal brought to heel and thoroughly outclassed with a fucking _boot_ on his chest.

 

Instead of that continuous feed, Ira’s visions came in patchy scenes full of agonizing sensation.

 

He heard people talking around him, snatches of familiar voices that he could half make out.  He couldn’t understand the words, but they came so fast, rapid and concerned.  How could something sound so loud and so far away at the same time? What he could see beyond long stretches of darkness was blurry and often times far too bright for him to properly focus on it for more than a second before his eyes began to water.  He could have sworn he felt people touching him, but it hurt so fucking much and always sent him spiraling back down into black.  Every time he re-emerged from darkness, the world had changed somehow, but it was all too much to grasp.  If this was his life, he felt pretty cheated.

 

He never once heard his mother or his father.

 

At one point he could have sworn he felt a pinch at the inner crook of his right elbow and then the blackness came again, all consuming and final.  Nobody ever talked about being dead hurting this damn much.  He wondered briefly if this was Hell.

 

Then he stopped thinking about much of anything at all.

 

__________

 

Angela heaved a sigh of relief that was more physical than audible when her patient finally stopped thrashing and lay still, strapped down on the gurney they kept for emergency triage in the back of the transport.  With infinite care, she slipped the needle from the crook of his elbow and pressed a bit of cotton over the injection site to stem the blood.  One-handed, she set the needle on a nearby tray before raking a hand through her sweaty hair.  The bright gold of it had long gone lank and unpleasant, but somehow she didn’t have it in her to care.  Her eyes kept drifting back to the young man strapped to the gurney, carefully tracking the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

 

She’d done what she could with the staff and what technology she carried on away missions, but those were never meant to handle something so massive over such a short period of time.  Frankly, she thought with the sudden urge to vomit indelicately, it was a miracle the boy had survived with the scope of his injuries.  He had a concussion, that much had been clear by the irregular dilation of his pupils when she’d examined them...and by the swathe of black and blue that wrapped around half of his face.  His head and neck were covered in an array of razor-fine cuts from the damaged windshield, but they’d been shallow enough to be superficial; ugly, but not dangerous.  What concerned her more was the body-wide rash he had, red and weeping, from the venom mine that had been planted on the underside of the truck’s chassis.  What horrified her was the place where his right side was essentially torn open from catching the edge of a shotgun blast (an injury that should have killed him from shock alone).

 

He was stable now, but she wouldn’t be able to rest until she had him under close observation at Gibraltar.  The sight of him lying on the ground by McCree’s side when they arrived would haunt her nightmares for years to come.

 

Angela slumped and put her face in her hands, resting her elbows on her knees in exhaustion while she replayed the incident on a gut-churning loop.

 

They’d gotten the SOS from McCree up in the transport and had been quick to touch down so that Mercy could heed the call.  The Swiss woman had stepped out into the hot air of an African day bracing herself for any number of sticky situations she’d find the chagrinned cowboy in.  Maybe he’d gotten too cocky with Reaper and had taken a bullet.  Maybe Widowmaker had been too quick for Hanzo and had managed to land a shot.  She had certainly not been prepared for finding Overwatch’s personal anachronism sitting on his rump on the ground, looking completely at a loss for words.  It had immediately put her on her guard.

 

If Jesse McCree was anything, speechless was not it.

 

Her eyes drifted to the still figure by his side and she took a few steps closer, speaking with the crisp professionalism that indicated she knew what she was doing and everything would be alright, “McCree.  Is he still breathing?”

 

The old cowboy shook his head uncertainly, “He ain’t gone toes-up yet, but it’s a near thing.”

 

Suddenly, she found herself pinned under the full force of the most hangdog expression she’d seen on him since he’d been a much, much younger man, “Angie, look, I’m powerful sorry.  I woulda called anybody else if we had ‘em.  Shit, honey…”

 

It rattled her.

 

Mercy firmed up her voice, “It is okay, McCree.  I must see him, however, if I am to resuscitate him.”

 

The medic didn’t understand what on Earth had shaken Jesse so badly, why he felt such a need to defend her.  She had been knee-deep in blood the same as any of them had seen the worst that man and machine could do to one another.  She was the one who had pieced the cowboy back together all those years ago, the one who had rebuilt Genji using the wreckage of his old body.  What could possibly be worse than all the hours she spent trying desperately not to sweat over a young man’s vital organs, up to her elbows in offal and stinking of all the things flesh is heir to?

 

She stepped forward firmly, gently brooking no dissent.  Angela would worry over Jesse’s shellshock later, firmly putting it near the bottom of the list of her current concerns.  The Alpha sensed her intent and shifted out of her way slightly, surrendering his spot to her determination.

 

The instant he was out of the way, everything clicked into place.

 

Angela didn’t even have to look at the soldier’s nametag.  A person’s face didn’t change that much in less than a year.

 

She recalled how low her voice had dropped then, rolling around in a place usually only Alphas could reach, “Move.”

 

Barely waiting for the gunslinger to get out of the way, she’d thrown herself onto her knees next to Ira’s form.  Clinically, she’d registered the shock to her knee-caps, some far-away part of her brain reeling off statistics, facts, and figures about what damage she might have done, cataloguing it.  The forefront of her brain was dedicated wholly towards trying not to panic.  She was scrabbling to hold onto her professional decorum tooth and nail, fighting past the urge to groan and clutch the boy she’d helped raise to her.  The logical part of her knew her godson truly _would_ perish if she gave in to her animal hysteria, so she rose above.  She hadn’t wept for Jack.  She hadn’t wept for Gabriel.  

 

No, she had pulled herself up by her big-girl knickers and _saved_ them.  Ira deserved no less.  Her heart could break on its own time.

 

The world had lost focus then, a victim to her singular tunnel vision.  Time ceased to matter.  Her situational awareness eroded into nothing.  The ravages of time meant nothing to Angela Ziegler when she utilized the Caduceus staff, for she had become the master of it.  She was a force of nature no less than Father Time, gripping him by the beard even while she snatched the minutes back again from the shadow of Death itself.  Nothing could stop her.  She would shatter the hourglass.  All that mattered in this moment was her stygian task and nothing else, even her own wellbeing.

 

She only came away and back to the world when strong hands pulled her from the proverbial edge.  Leather gloves wrapped around her and hauled her up, pulling her out of her fervor like a fish from a stream.  Mercy had come back to awareness to see Hanzo bundling Ira carefully into their transport, Jesse holding her protectively to his chest.

 

“Easy, darlin’.  Easy.  He’s as stable as he’s gonna get.  We gotta scram before the WAPIS gets here or we’re all in for it,” he had said.  

 

He had reeled her away, letting her track Ira’s disappearing form with her eyes.

 

Back in the present time, Angela kept her face in her hands, trying to breathe evenly while Tracer piloted the transport back to Gibraltar as smoothly as she could manage.  

 

The atmosphere in the transport was tense.  Jesse was sitting against one of the far walls in a row seat, his arms folded over the barrel of his chest.  Every once in awhile his eyes would flick over to Angela and her too-still patient, the metal fingers of his prosthetic hand twitching slightly like he was holding himself back.  It was as much an Alpha trait as it was a McCree one, the urge to comfort and protect (or to dominate, in those with poorer social skills).  Jack had manifested it in its positive forms quite openly, especially as the years had gone on.  Next to him, Hanzo was still as a stone, exhibiting neither stress nor concern, eyes closed and breathing even.  He had questions, clearly, but the austerity of his upbringing and his nature prevented him from asking while Angela and Ira were present...or at all.

 

In the cockpit, Tracer kept her eyes forward, back rigid and shoulders tight.  She’d radioed back to Numbani through a scrambled signal to make sure there was a rescue team headed towards the attack site for the survivors.  Then she’d radioed ahead to base to inform them of the mission’s outcome and to tell them they had an extra passenger.  There had been a bit of back and forth as if she’d been having an argument with Winston on the other end, but she’d ended it with a very flat declaration that they’d discuss it later because ‘By God, Winston, I am flying this bloody plane and if you don’t like it, you can grow wings and come stop me’.  It had ended the debate pretty quickly and Winston had signed off with a gruff order that the plucky pilot meet him in the control room as soon as they all touched down at the Watchpoint.

 

They sat in pregnant silence after that.

 

Angela spent the majority of the ride tuning everything out, idle as a doll, only springing to life when one of Ira’s monitors pinged.  She’d work in a flurry for a few furious moments before settling back into the tense lull.  It had everyone’s nerves riding the edge as the little craft winged quietly across the water back towards the Spanish coast.  The unpleasant quiet grew more and more grim, laced with an electrical, wary edge as the minutes dragged on.  There was nothing to focus on in the craft but their thoughts, and certainly none of them were very pleasant.  The only thing to break the pall was the occasional rasping breath from the gurney and the tick-tick-tick of Angela’s kitten heels as she tended to his distress.

 

By the time they finally touched down in the main hangar of Watchpoint: Gibraltar, the staticky pulse running in their veins was nearing critical mass.  The clock kept winding down and it seemed like they couldn’t arrive fast enough.  

 

There was a palpable tremor that ran through the occupants of the transport when the comm system fizzled to life above them, Tracer’s chagrinned voice piping up with the auditory equivalent of rubbing the back of her head in embarrassment, “Alright love, we’re touching down in five.  I’ve got to dash up to Winston for a quick debrief when we land, but you go ahead and get the kiddo to the infirmary, yeah?”

 

For being one of their most hyperactive and childlike members, Tracer was surprisingly good at diplomacy.  At the moment, she was choosing to address what was likely going to be a lot of raised voices with a very old friend as a ‘debrief’.  She was a stalwart idealist, an embodiment of the perennial notion of the cock-eyed optimism.  She’d seen all the same chaos and war and carnage as the others.  She’d stared death in the face down the barrel of more than one hostile Bastion Unit.  She’d been forced too young to live a horrifying half-existence as some sort of un-anchored chronal specter, but she also knew very well that she’d survived and come out the other side of the tempest into the sunshine.  It was knowledge she carried with her and coloured the way she greeted all situations.

 

Greet each day with a smile, a hope in your heart, and your gun unholstered.

 

The comm flipped off with a grating buzz and Angela slid into a seat for landing, sliding a hand over her hair in an attempt to collect herself even slightly, “...I will require assistance getting him across the base.”

 

Hanzo’s inscrutable almond-shaped eyes flicked to her fast as a striking snake, his voice chesty in that odd, cultured way of his, “I will help you transport the soldier.”

 

For a moment, the medic tried to read him.  He only gazed back, still as water on a winter day while the transport settled smoothly.  It wasn’t that Angela disliked the elder Shimada (no matter how much evidence she had personally dragged her fingers through that he had his dark side), it was more that he liked to avoid her.  He had from his very first days on the base.  That he would willingly volunteer his time to her while McCree was right there and fully capable was nothing short of shocking.  

 

The hatch of the little transport opened and the moment broke, Angela dipping her chin sharply to accept his help.  The assassin and the medic moved in tandem towards where Ira lay, picking him up and preparing to transport him out.  Hanzo gathered the taller soldier up while Angela took charge of the hanging IV bags and their tubing, holding them aloft and keeping pace so the needles wouldn’t tear flesh or slide out.  A blur of blue zipped out, barely ruffling them with the breeze as Tracer dashed for her rendezvous before anyone could intercept her and slow down the team racing for the Med Bay.   She headed straight for the nerve center of their rebel Overwatch...Winston’s computer hub.

 

__________

 

Winston leaned his full weight over his control panel, both elbows digging into the metal paneling all around the softly glowing cryptograms.  He was canted forward on his big tire, legs half folded in a messy akimbo, his toes folding open and closed at irregular intervals while he thought.  One of his large, leathery paws held his spectacles loosely by a stem of the frames, the blunt fingers of the other kneading into the bridge of his nose.  He wasn’t a young creature anymore, well into his silverback years, but all the strain of this precarious balancing act he was trying to orchestrate made him feel ancient beyond his time.  What did Lena think she was doing?

 

She was more shrewd than this.  More thoughtful.  He understood the pull of the heart more than most, the urge to aid those in need.  It was the reason he’d issued the Recall, wasn’t it? But bringing American military here? Their nerve center? This organization was still in its infancy and all it would take was a whistleblower to have the UN hunting them down ferociously.

 

He’d been in deep, fretful contemplation for hours ever since he’d gotten off the call with Lena.  His heart, full of compassion and a deep-seated impulse to aid all of those in need, wanted to side with his old friend.  It needled him with questions of what else she was meant to have done, reminded him that very few among their number possessed the ability to just _let_ someone die.  Gabriel had been able to do it back in the days of Blackwatch, but he had done worse besides and it still turned Winston’s stomach a bit to remember (he wasn’t as forgiving of those transgressions as Angela).  Jack had the ability to make the tough calls even if he’d obsess over them later.  That circled Winston’s thoughts back around, reminded him that Jack wasn’t the leader of Overwatch anymore.   _He_ was...and that meant he couldn’t just wear the white hat anymore.

 

Overhead, a smooth tone sounded followed by Athena’s dulcet, almost fond, voice, “Winston, your heart rate is elevated.  Perhaps some deep breathing exercises?”

 

Winston released a great sigh that turned to a snort just slightly at the end, “I’m fine, Athena.  Just a lot on my mind.  Let me know when Tracer is on her way, alright?”

 

There was a moment of quiet, the Athena equivalent of a raised eyebrow and a cleared throat, “...Agent Tracer will knock on the door in…”

 

A perfunctory series of rapid-fire knocks started the scientist out of his reverie before Lena’s perpetual bed-head popped ‘round the corner, “I swear I’ll beat you one day, Athena, you big old tattle-tale! ‘Allo Winston, love.  You wanted to see me?”

 

“Ah...yes.  Lena, we need to talk,” Winston tried to sound professional as he leaned his weight back away from his control board, tried to conceal that he very much just wanted to take his old friend by the shoulders and shake her.

 

She walked towards him at a normal pace, hands held up and not even wiggling her long, expressive fingers as she did so.  She aimed to be serious about this.

 

“Winston…”

 

The ape slid his glasses back onto his nose, cutting awkwardly over her while he still had his thoughts together and a clear argument on his tongue, “Look, I understand the impulse to save who we can when it’s in our power to do so.  No one understands more than me, but Lena...bringing an American militaryman here? This isn’t the old days where we were a haven for all...we’re an illegal operation now.  All they have to do is make a report in and we’re all in prison...those of us who won’t be shipped back to our home countries and shot or worse.  You’ve put a lot of your fellow agents in danger.”

 

Lena put her hands down, folding them akimbo, “Winston, this one isn’t gonna grass us up.”

 

“How can you be so sure?!” He let a bit of his exasperation slip when his old friend seemed to blithely ignore the danger.

 

“Because it’s Jack’s kiddo.”

 

“...It’s Ira?”

 

The little pilot’s eyes were rueful, half lidded and bruise-tender, “Yeah.  He’s practically one of ours.  He would have died if we left him out there.  Angela was barely holding him together.  Miracle he made it this far, really.”

 

She was playing at cavalier and very nearly pulling it off.  Suffice it to say, most of Winston’s argument evaporated on the spot.

 

Most.

 

“It’s...it’s no guarantee, Lena.  He hasn’t seen most of us in 10 years and he works for the American government now.  His loyalties could easily have shifted since he was a child…” in his heart, Winston had already surrendered, but the argument still needed to be made.

 

His smaller friend just looked as exhausted as he felt, missing her usual pep, “If he makes it, we’ll worry about that, Winston.  Reaper did a number on him.”

 

“He’s that bad?” All the arguments were gone now and Winston couldn’t bring himself to care.

 

From overhead, Athena hummed to life, “Morrison-Reyes, Ira has just been logged into the Medical Bay with Agents Ziegler and Shimada.  Catalogued injuries are superficial lacerations around the head and neck, severe contusions to the face and side of the skull, concussion, hairline fractures in the metacarpals, and a large perforation in the right side of the thoracic cavity.”

 

Winston looked to Tracer, “And you’re sure it’s him?”

 

One delicate finger swirled in a circle in the vague direction of their AI’s voice, “Athena stores everyone’s biometrics.  She recognized him, didn’t she?”

 

“So it would seem,” Winston conceded quietly.  He flexed his toes, looking for words, “Is Angela alright? McCree?”

 

“McCree’s a bit shaken over it all, bless his cotton socks.  Angie…” Lena sighed and brought her hand down to scrub through her fluffy locks, “Time will tell.”

 

Winston’s eyes drifted to her chronal accelerator, “So it will.  For now, I should contact our operatives in the field, warn them we need to conduct our activities under a heightened threat level until we know how much WAPIS is taking note of our movements in Numbani.  You’re...free to go, Lena.”

 

The corner of her eyes crinkled with warmth as she turned to leave, “It’s ‘dismissed’, big guy.”

 

He offered her a rueful little smile, “...Still haven’t gotten the hang of this leadership thing quite yet.  Give me time.”

 

“All you like, love.  We’ll call it returning the favor, yeah?” she tapped her accelerator and blinked away to leave him alone with his thoughts.

 

The minute she was gone, the gorilla’s face fell, all remnants of of a smile smoothed from his heavy features by a wave of fatigue and worry.  He reached up with one foot to tap away at the cryptograms on his board, putting out a ping on an isolated channel designated to one of their operatives running solo.  He’d notify the rest of their field teams later (at the moment only Genji off checking the status of several abandoned safe houses around Hanamura, Mei and Zarya doing the same in Grimsey), but he had to leave a special message first.  He waited until a little peeping noise informed him he’d been patched through.

 

“76, I know this is abrupt, but we need you back at Gibraltar.”

 

__________

 

At this point, Jesse’s needs in life had been narrowed down to a beer, a kip, and a shower.  Frankly, the shower was negotiable.

 

Jesse had lingered around the transport to put it through post-flight checks while Lena went to go and have her little Come-to-Jesus meeting with Winston.  He wouldn’t have been in her shoes for all the bourbon in Kentucky, no sir.  Winston didn’t have half the bitch face that Reyes had and certainly couldn’t make the cowboy fear for his life like the Omega, but he had something far, far worse.  Their new leader had the uncanny ability to look like his mother when she was disappointed in all of his life’s choices.  It did something to his stomach, made it feel like lead.  So yeah, he had been just peachy with taking care of the chores he normally avoided if it meant he could keep a shred of his Alpha pride a little longer.

 

When he’d done all he could think to do, he continued to stand on the gantry of the transport for longer than was necessary, stuck in Limbo.

 

He felt the inexorable pull back towards the Med Bay where he knew the good doctor was working herself down to the damn bone to save Gabriel Reyes’ kid.  He knew he should go at least put in an appearance for support, but something about the thought made him uneasy.  Jesse McCree was one of the most proud Alphas most folks’d ever stumble across.  He didn’t like being reminded about all the times things went wrong...and since he was also a very cocky, headstrong man, things went wrong a lot.  It generally meant that he was a fella who wasn’t too fond of looking back or re-living the past.  Too many old wounds and reminders, too many old fox-holes to trip over in the war zone that was his history.  

 

It was part of what made fuckin’ around with the elder Shimada so rewarding.  The guy knew a thing or two about regrettable pasts and didn’t badger.  They fought like cats and dogs a lot of the time (a pretty common thing in the rare Alpha pairings that cropped up), but they clicked in the ways that counted.  Neither of them were huge fans of their personal histories, so it wasn’t exactly a common topic.

 

That kid in there, though?

 

He was a walking memory from a time where Jesse had been so damn sure he’d gotten it right for once.  He’d left his Deadlock days behind, stopped stealing from them that had less for no other reason than that he could.  He still did unscrupulous shit, sure, but at least with Blackwatch he felt like he was doing some good.  He felt like, at least this time, when he shoved himself up to the elbows in shit it was to help clear it away and help the world.  Jesse had finally been a part of a team that cared about whether he lived or died, had made friends, and had started building himself up out of the quagmire of his ill-spent youth.  He remembered the kid from those days, how a little bit of patience with the tyke and a gift had softened Reyes up towards him immensely.  Then it had all gone straight to hell.

 

Everything, _everything_ Jesse had scraped together to build himself a shiny new foundation had gone up along with the Zurich base and two men he’d considered as good as friends.  Two good men dead, one gone mad beforehand, their kid orphaned, countless other lives lost, lord only knew how many in jail, and Jesse alone again with no means of gainful employment.  Suddenly, the whole world was questioning en masse the good that the cowboy had thought he had been doing.  It was enough to leave a guy jaded right down to the tips of his boots.  

 

With that in mind, coming back after the Recall had been difficult, but Jesse had convinced himself it wasn't some misguided effort to bring back the fabled 'glory days'.  It was another attempt at making a future, a good one this time.  

 

Watching the last remnant of Reyes and Morrison die in a sterile operating room was a shade beyond what he thought he could stomach, however.

 

Jesse threaded his thumbs into his belt and tapped his metal pointer finger against the ostentatious ‘BAMF’ buckle he wore.  He listened to the metallic report ping off the spacious walls of the hangar and sighed, thinking of the woman who’d given it to him.  If the kid _did_ die, making Angela face it alone would have been the most selfish, shitty thing he’d ever done in a life full of selfish, shitty things.  Just because the cowboy didn’t like remembering the past didn’t mean he forgot about the debts or the loyalties he owed, not always.  

 

He had heaved a great sigh and pushed himself into motion with a muttered, “Hell.”

 

Now he sat outside the Med Bay on a low bench with his hat pulled low and his arms folded up across his chest, trying to look like the picture of ease.  He’d been out here for hours, long enough to watch Lucio rush in, struggling with a set of frog-patterned scrubs that he wore when he assisted Angela in the infirmary.  He’d heard more than seen Tracer dart by after her meeting with Winston.  The big guy hadn’t been down yet, but Jesse knew he’d be around when things were quieter.  There wasn’t too much foot traffic to distract him from his thoughts, though.  Most of the folks didn’t know the kid on the operating table from Adam.  Only Lena, Winston, Genji, Fareeha, Angela, and himself really knew the kid...and of that, only Angela and Winston had been particularly close.

 

It left him a long time to sit alone with his memories on that hard bench, doing his damndest not to fidget.  He didn’t even sneak away to procure himself a smoke, haunted by the notion that the kid would up and croak during the brief minutes he was away.  It just didn’t feel right to abandon his self-assigned post.  So he sat and he waited and he wished to high heaven for a whiskey and a miracle.

 

What he got however was the soft hiss of the door sliding open around hour three or so, Hanzo stepping out silently and engaging the door behind him.

 

McCree looked up eagerly before he could stop himself, a question in his dark eyes.

 

The ronin nodded his head in the direction of a nearby hallway that let out onto an observation deck.  Wordlessly, Jesse followed, his steps heavier than the smaller man’s, but still making an effort at quiet.  They didn’t speak as they walked side-by-side, going at a moderate pace until they were out under the stars that had snuck out across the Spanish sky without anyone noticing.  The air smelled of salt and was filled with the sound of the Alboran Sea crashing on the rocks below and beyond.

 

The cowboy spoke first, “C’mon darlin, you’re killin’ me.”

 

“Still patience eludes you,” Hanzo grumbled, a divot of disapproval digging in between his dark brows.  He indulged Jesse anyway, “The soldier is stable.  It is Ziegler’s prognosis that he will live, given proper time and attention.  For the moment, he is in a medically induced coma while she monitors brain function.  The damage to his skull was severe.”

 

“Fuck me sideways,” McCree exhaled, feeling a weird combination of relief and unease.

 

Hanzo ignored the colloquialism for the moment, but suspicion was written across the arches of his fine, almond eyes and tucked into the set of his mouth.  He was mulling over something, one elbow resting in the crook of his kyudo-gi in the pocket naturally made by the blousing around the obi.  He watched his lover with curious dragon’s eyes, a gaze that used to outright unnerve Jesse when he first met the stern man.  It was a look almost too calculating to be human, a predator’s eyes looking out from a human face.

 

When he spoke, it was with great care, choosing his words with artful economy, “I have witnessed similar injuries in my time.  Most die from shock.  Those who survive suffer brain damage so crippling they may well be dead.”

 

“Well, ain’t you just a ray of sunshine,” Jesse finally gave into his urge for a smoke, rummaging around and slipped one out of its box.

 

The inquisitive look narrowed sharply, dangerously, “Do not play at being obtuse.  It is an offense to both our intellects, one I do not appreciate.”

 

Jesse punctuated his frustration with a flick of his lighter, “Shit, sugar, what the hell d’ya want me to say?”

 

“This boy.  How is it he survived such damage with hope for his mental faculties?”

 

“Some folks are just made’a sterner stuff, I guess.”

 

He was being cagey and he knew it.  Seemed that his lover did too, that ferocious look fading a bit into something cool and knowing.  Jesse only played at these infuriating guessing games when he was dancing around an uncomfortable topic, one he didn’t care to dwell on.  With most folks, he could just play dumb and tapdance neatly around the subject until they either took the hint and let it drop, or got too annoyed to keep up with the one-sided conversation.  Hanzo Shimada, however, was more patient than his snarling bad moods gave credence to and just as stubborn an Alpha as Jesse McCree, if not moreso.  While normally he honored Jesse’s stalwart desire not to dredge up ancient history, he seemed to be in a contrary mood tonight.

 

“Jesse,” he spoke directly to the cowboy, abandoning his surname, “Who is the soldier? Angela is a woman possessed and you look as though you have seen a ghost.”

 

“Didn’t read his name badge, didja?” the cowboy asked, making a last ditch attempt at avoiding the question by being a miserable little shit, “Dragon eyes failin’ ya, sweetness?”

 

Hanzo didn’t rise to the bait, the bastard, watching him evenly.  He knew the steps to this dance very well by now, “The jacket had to be removed that Ziegler could examine his wounds.”

 

Silence fell between them, dogged and sullen.  Neither of the two Alphas was willing to give.

 

At last, his smaller lover made contact, reaching up to rest one powerful hand over his chest.  Jesse thrilled a bit at the knowledge that all it would take was one particularly hard push for the elder Shimada to collapse his breastbone if he so chose.  It was always heady to realize the damage his dragon could do to him, even moreso to acknowledge that he never would.  He could practically feel one of the archer’s considerable calluses through the fabric of his shirt.

 

“If you tell me honestly that you do not wish to speak of it now, I will relent.”

 

Jesse let out a huffing breath not unlike a wary horse and reached down to lay a hand over the archer’s in a truce, “I’ll tell ya soon, darlin’, but not tonight.  Lemme do it in my own time.”

 

Hanzo’s dark eyes watched him carefully for a moment, taking in his whole face before nodding shortly, “As you wish”.  A wry upturn appeared at the corner of his lips, “...your repayment for not perishing today, as I requested.”

 

“Meaner’n a snake, you are,” McCree groused through a grin, some of his usual blithe humor restored by the reprieve his lover had granted him.

 

His smirk widened slightly and he brought his hands around to Hanzo’s waist, tucking his gloved fingers in right where his oblique muscles nipped in towards the arch of his hips (careful to hold the glowing cherry of his smoke away with two fingers), “Prettiest snake since the Devil tempted Eve, though.”

 

He moved in for a kiss, feeling the little gut-punch thrill of not only being alive and allowed to not re-live his past for another day, but also that the kiddo had pulled through.  Hell, he was glad for a lot of things and he poured them all into that kiss, big hands gripping rudely at the elder dragon.  Everything felt crisp and clear for the first time all day out there under the stars, his chapped lips dragging across Hanzo’s mouth, feeling him push back.  A sharp nip chased him off, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel too sore about it when his lover was pulling back with a faint look of approval on his face.

 

“I am going to sleep.  Join me when you are ready,” Hanzo said, primly tucking a hair back into place before turning to go.

 

He paused with his hand on the door and called over his shoulder, “I am gold coins to a cat to you, you know.”

 

Jesse saluted him with his cigarillo, feeling remarkably better about the day than he had when he’d first left the hangar, “Damn right, sugar.  Get on to bed now.  I’ll catch up in a bit.”

 

__________

 

Angela hadn’t been this exhausted in years.

 

Normally, sleep didn’t come easily to the medic.  She was a creature of perpetual service, never enough hours in the day for all she wished to do, for everything that she needed to monitor, for everyone she needed to care for.  As such, sleep was a thing that came in snatches and at peculiar hours that never followed a set schedule.  Very rarely did she just drop where she sat.  The last time she could actively remember had been years ago in a secret location with as much equipment as she could muster, bending the laws of nature to keep an old friend from meeting his maker.  She’d slept so deeply afterwards that she’d lost an entire day.

 

Now she was slumped over in a chair next to the bed they’d moved her godson to, one arm dropped limply in her lap and the other folded over on the bed.  She had her face pressed into the arm on the bed, pushing fabric-lines into the smooth cushion of her cheek.  The rise and fall of her chest was steady.  It would have probably taken a bomb to rouse her now after she’d poured so much of herself, her time, and her energy into today’s efforts.  Lucio has been kind enough to put one of the standard issue clinic blankets over her shoulders before returning to his quarters for the rest of the night.

 

Next to her, Ira drifted in a medicated sleep, his breathing deep and mechanical and slow.  He was undressed from the waist up to make room for the thick swathes of bandages that covered him from nipple to navel.  Fireworks of bruises exploded across the exposed skin, even leeching up from under the cast on his shooting hand from where the Reaper had kicked him.  Half of his face was a mask of blacks, blues, purples, and greens.  His short hair was mussed up and stuck up in odd places, pressed flat to his head in others.  A sharp black line of stitches stood out under one eye where the glass from the windshield had gone deep enough that it needed seeing to, would leave a scar he would carry with him for the rest of his days.  Sensors were stuck to his temples so his brain activity could be monitored and recorded.

 

He looked like he’d been dragged behind a horse backwards, but he was still alive, and that was something.

 

Angela had never cared for the SEP program really, but she’d done nothing but bless it when its genetic effects had been the only thing keeping her friends together on three different and equally awful occasions now.

 

It was hushed in the infirmary, the only sounds were two souls breathing and the steady blip of the machines monitoring Ira’s vitals.  No one was around or awake enough to notice the spot of pure darkness that slipped in through the cracks, oozed across the floor, and slithered up under the bed near Ira’s head.  Reaper couldn’t take a solid form here lest the AI that lurked around every corner catch wind of him, but there were still enough patches in her security from his last attack that he could at least do this.  He couldn’t act in any way, couldn’t play the part of the aggressor, but at the moment this was enough.  He would slip away before dawn and take his borrowed transport from where he’d hidden it away on the outskirts of the opposite side of Gibraltar.  None of the idiots would even know they’d been infiltrated.

 

He’d make excuses for his disappearance later, would bury deep down his Omega urges to curl up around his pup and bare his teeth at anyone who dared to come close.

 

For a few stolen moments, though, he hovered there and just listened to the steady machine sounds of life and let them reassure him that he hadn’t done something he couldn’t take back.  

 

Not this time.

 

 

____________

 

_Author's Notes_

_* WAPIS - the West African Police Information System.  According to the European Commission, their mission is to " Harmonize and structure the national and regional management of police information in the broader West Africa region in order to increase and improve law enforcement capabilities from the concerned countries in their daily work".  As Numbani is a West African country, I reasoned they'd fall under WAPIS scrutiny._

_* McCree and Hanzo aren't mated in this continuity, just lovers.  Alpha/Alpha pairings are considered rarer in this canon._

_* Grimsey is a little island off the northern coast of Iceland._

_* 'Gold coins to a cat' is a Japanese idiom.  The English cultural equivalent is 'cast your pearls before swine'.  Essentially, Hanzo is jokingly saying he's wasted on McCree._

_* 'Come-to-Jesus meeting' is an idiom meaning to have a meeting of a severe nature about your behaviour or actions._

_* For those not versed in Christian mythos, Eve (the mother of humanity) was tricked by the Devil in the form of a snake at the beginning of time.  McCree is alluding to that._

_* Here is a full designation listing (of ones I have so far) in case any of you are curious: Gabriel (Omega), Jack (Alpha), Mercy (Beta), Hanzo (Alpha), McCree (Alpha), Genji (Beta), Lucio (Omega), D.Va (Alpha)._

_* In this canon, Lucio provides aid in the clinic when Angela is overloaded; basic triage and stabilization._

_* Next Chapter: Action Dad!_

_* Both Angela and Winston know who 76 is (and it's my belief for this canon that Winston actually asked Jack to take over, but was declined).  Only Angela is aware of Reaper's identity.  Expect a come-to-Jesus meeting over THAT one._

_* This will probably be the last plot installment until after Labor Day.  Dragon*Con is approaching fast and I have two major costumes to finish.  Plus, my Master's Degree courses start again soon.  I WILL probably write a McHanzo fanservice chapter between then and now though._

_* If anyone is at Dragon*Con in Atlanta this year, have fun! The Overwatch photoshoot is at 2pm on Saturday._

_*As always, everyone who reads this fic is my own personal hero.  You're all wonderful.  I'm proud to be part of such an open fandom.  I love your kudos, your comments, and even the attentive silences.  I just hope I continue to make people happy with my writing._


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